danivon wrote:And hey, we can mock religious beliefs, just as much as any other belief. I don't care that you mock science (even with your limited grasp of it). Stopping mockery or criticism of religion is what the enemies of freedom want.

Please. I cannot abide this PC pretense that somehow the attacks are not predominately Muslim. What these "enemies of freedom" want is submission to their version of Islam and nothing less.

My objection was to Tom's declaration that you can't mock religion. That seems to me to be as PC as what you accuse me of.

But the answer is not to stop mocking religion, or get all precious when it's yours that is mocked. Certainly it is not to tell people what they can't say about religion.

While there is not much Christian terror (there is some), there are those who seek to impose their Christian views on others, whether it is by banning gay marriage, or even in one recent case I saw a local judge refusing to officiate at a non-Christian but heterosexual marriage.

If I am to take your words at face value (as I wish to do!), I don't understand what you meant by:Maybe I meant silly notions like "Truth, Justice and the American Way", or "sovereign citizens movements", or "I am Napoleon Bonapart"?

Other than the spelling error of Bonaparte, which was a typing error and no concern; the maybe is confusing. The fact that I can safely assume that you are not Napoleon is comforting.

What I mean is that each of those three beliefs is mere ideology, a belief in things that do not actually exist.

The first is a set of abstract concepts which at first we may all agree exist as such, but if you dig deeper we find that no-one really agrees what the definition of each is. Truth for one man is despicable lies to another. Justice can be about retribution, or atonement, or liberation, or restoration. Some think it includes the death penalty, others think it cannot. The American Way is ever changing and little more than a slogan.

The next statement refers to groups who believe that using arcane and convoluted legal arguments they can show that they are not bound by the same laws as anyone else. Usually it is a tax dodge but some take it seriously and have killed agents of the state.

The last is just a cliché of personal delusion, a little overstated and more about a mental illness but frankly given the oddness that "sane" people swallow whole as fact I sometimes wonder where the line is drawn.

They were in quotes as something a person (not me specifically) may believe that is based on non-existent things.

They are examples, along with the earlier list of categories - "I wasn't limiting it to religion. Some science has been wacky. People have all kinds of beliefs in ghosts, angels, lucky totems, their sports teams, politics, that you can lose weight without using diet and exercise, etc etc." of stuff that humans hold to that don't exist (or areas where beliefs in the non-existent arise).

As to why, I would speculate that we don't like gaps, uncertainty, randomness etc. So we fill the gaps with convenient and simple explanations. Examples are: primitive societies would ask why the sun appeared to move around them overhead and disappear overnight before reappearing, and invented sun-gods in chariots like Apollo; looking up at the night sky and seeing patterns of constellations which are made up of stars which are nowhere near each other but just in a handy similar direction from us and kind of arranged so you could draw a Bear / Plough / Dipper.

God bless and keep this priest whose very ministry promoted the love of enemies and the forgiveness of persecutors. God bless him for his example of love. God bless him for reminding the world that we can not allow ourselves to be caught up with rage and hate.

dag hammarsjkold wrote:God bless and keep this priest whose very ministry promoted the love of enemies and the forgiveness of persecutors. God bless him for his example of love. God bless him for reminding the world that we can not allow ourselves to be caught up with rage and hate.